Sunday, January 14, 2018

The new year begins

At the turn of the year, the weather warmed up a little bit. We managed to get outside, since this winter hasn't been as rainy as last winter.

B took the camera to take a picture of our Christmas lights (miraculously back from the dead after shorting out last year). Jared photobombed his picture.

I found out from a homeschool group that I participate in that the Seattle Symphony does side by side concerts with high school band and orchestra groups. They perform these in Benaroya Hall, the home stage of the symphony, but they don't charge for entry. One of these happened on January 5, so I took Jared and Eloise to their first symphony concert. We may have been a little bit overdressed for a Seattle event. Lots of people stopped us to tell Eloise how much they loved her dress, and someone chased us all of the way across the lobby to tell Jared that he looks great in his suit. At our parking garage, someone asked us if we were coming from a wedding. I thought we looked perfect for a special evening at the symphony.

We ran into our friends, the Carvers, at the symphony. They were having a family date. We sat up in this box, which was good, since the kids were getting tired, and a little restless. The concert ran right into bedtime. They were great, though. We had a good time identifying the different instruments. There was a high school flute soloist playing a concerto, and she looked like a princess. All of the little girls were riveted by her performance. The last piece had cymbals, which kept us wide awake.

Grandma and Grandpa Knight sent these matching outfits for Christmas. These boys loved them so much that they have worn them every day that they are clean, but the sixth of January was the first time they managed to get them on at the same time.

Eloise, who is a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes, draws cartoons for us almost every day. I particularly love this one. She makes good use of "Twisted Space Frog."

The kids were excited to start piano lessons again after the holidays/illness break. Piano teacher Sam is also Jared's primary teacher at church this year, which Jared likes a lot.

We bought our membership at the Pacific Science Center on January 10 last year, so we hurried to do what we thought was our last visit to the science center on January 9. Fortunately our membership goes to the end of the month. This is good because we didn't get to see Sammy's favorite exhibit, the bugs, on this visit.

The kids learned about dinosaurs at science class this week.

Even though Todd has virtual reality at home, these kids can't get enough. They watched this virtual reality underwater tour. Sammy wasn't old enough, so we watched.

I don't know why, but the Knight kids are nuts about University of Washington research. Maybe I should tell them that they won't get reduced tuition in a few years for spending so much time getting their brains analyzed for research. There was a research post set up with a test to gather data on when kids develop perceptions of gender bias in math. B said that boys like math more than girls, but I think he said that because he is a boy who likes math. The other kids said that boys and girls like math the same.

On January 10, Grandma and Grandpa Knight came from Arizona! They brought Christmas presents, and they are just about the best things ever. These boys throw themselves against each other even when they don't have a giant bubble to protect them, but the bubbles make it more fun.

Since we still have the membership, and it was too cold to take Grandma and Grandpa to the zoo (Arizona has made them temperature fragile), we went back to the science center. We have used up all of our guest passes, but the admissions guy let Grandma and Grandpa in for free anyway! This time we spent time with Sammy's favorite exhibits. This iguana really wanted to get out of its box.

Since it is over 80 degrees in the butterfly room, Grandma and Grandpa were happy to get in and thaw. The rest of us quickly overheated and headed off to watch a live science demonstration about combustion.

We love sharing our favorite places with Grandma and Grandpa, and we are happy that Grandpa is healthy enough to see the things he wants to see.

Jared is about to start a recorder unit in his music class at the elementary school. I had a recorder from my own fourth grade recorder unit, but the flimsy plastic cover it came with is toast, so Jared and I made this case for him to take his recorder to school. I didn't even use an online tutorial, and it came out exactly as I had imagined. This was my first time using the buttonhole feature on my sewing machine.

Grandpa wanted to tour Boeing. The tour isn't child friendly (you have to be four feet tall to participate), so Todd had a date with his mom and dad.

We are so glad to have Grandma and Grandpa Knight here to visit! This is a great start to the year.